Cisco New Texas Green Data Center Showcases Private Cloud Deployment

Hosting Services – SAN JOSE, CA – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced a new green data center in Allen, Texas, with an architecture deploying Cisco’s entire data center technology portfolio spanning computing, switching, and data storage access to support Cisco’s internal private cloud and deliver Information Technology (IT) as a service. The new data center demonstrates the value of a network-based approach through improved resilience, performance and use of resources, while delivering IT services such as video, mobility, security, and collaboration to Cisco employees, customers, partners, and other constituents.

In 2007 Cisco created a vision to deliver IT as a service and developed a long-range plan to deliver that vision through data center consolidation, virtualization, and cloud computing. Cisco’s newest data center combines the best in environment-friendly facility design, green approaches to power and cooling, and an architectural approach optimized for virtualization and cloud computing, with the aim of delivering “everything as a service.”

This next generation data center tightly integrates Cisco Unified Fabric, Unified Computing, and Unified Network Services into a holistic data center fabric designed to be simple, scalable and highly secure, delivering any application across any location, within the data center, across data centers, and to the cloud. Along with technology from key partners like EMC, NetApp, and VMware, the new data center is a showcase for Cisco solutions, including the Cisco Unified Computing System™, Nexus 7000 Series switches™, Nexus 5000 Series switches™, Nexus 1000V Virtual Switch™, MDS storage networking switches, Data Center Network Manager and NX-OS, a comprehensive data center operating system that spans the Cisco data center portfolio.

Data Center “Metro Pairs” Deliver Business Resiliency
Cisco’s new data center is paired with a second data center facility in Richardson, Texas to form what Cisco calls a Metro Virtual Data Center (MVDC). Together, the Active/Active data centers form a virtualized, dynamic IT services cloud, also serving as backup sites for one another. This enables both data centers to run real-time critical applications, such as WebEx, simultaneously in both places for world-class business resiliency.
Charting a Course to the Cloud
Cisco has plans to consolidate its data centers into three pairs of MVDC production data centers worldwide, which will serve as the building blocks for Cisco’s private cloud — Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructure Services. Through its resilient private cloud, Cisco will deliver to employees, customers, partners, and other constituents IT services like video, mobility, security, and collaboration, while reducing costs for hardware, real estate, power/cooling, and operations.
The Cloud Makes Data Centers Greener
While energy-efficient buildings and smarter power and cooling solutions contribute to greener data centers, the technology that runs the data center can also make a huge contribution. For example, a Unified Fabric in the data center unites storage and data traffic, reducing the number of switches, adapters and cabling required, and therefore the power usage. Cisco saved more than $1 million on cabling in this facility, and fewer cables translate to increased air circulation so the equipment runs cooler and more efficiently. Cloud computing is forecast to cut worldwide data center energy usage by 38 percent in 2020, according to “cleantech” analysts at Pike Research. This could also cut greenhouse gases by 28 percent in 2020 compared to 2010.
About Cisco Systems
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